You may be considering dental implants for a lot of reasons: durability, functionality and imperviousness to decay. But perhaps the winning reason is how they will make you look — their life-like quality can restore a smile marred by missing or disfigured teeth. Achieving that result, though, requires your dental team to determine beforehand the state of your bone and gums, and treat any conditions that would interfere with the final result.

The first area to look at is the amount of bone available to support the implant. An adequate amount is necessary not only to stabilize the implant, but to also ensure proper placement needed to achieve the best “smile” result. Your specialist, then, will take steps to protect available bone during procedures, or even aid in building up the bone structure by inserting grafting materials that encourage new bone growth.

The degree of bone volume in adjacent natural teeth is also important because it can greatly affect the health of the papillae. This is the triangular-shaped gum tissue that occurs between each tooth that gives normal teeth their arched appearance. Insufficient bone in these areas could cause the papillae not to regenerate properly around the implant site, which creates unsightly dark spaces in the gum tissue known as “black hole disease.”

We must next consider the quality and health of your gum tissue. Patients whose gum tissue tends to be thin face difficulties during cosmetic surgical procedures; their thinner tissues are also more prone for objects behind them to be visible, including metal or other crown materials.

Our aim is an implant crown emerging from the surrounding gum tissue just as a natural tooth would. To achieve this requires knowing first what we have to work with regarding your bone and gums, and to address any issues that are problematic. One aid in this process is to affix a temporary “prototype” crown on the implant to wear while the permanent crown is manufactured. This allows you to “test-drive” the new look, and make adjustments in the final product regarding color and materials.

Accounting for all these factors — and then making adjustments along the way — will help ensure the final crown meets your expectations for function and appearance.